Land Deals, No Cold Calls: How Brent Bowers Makes Money With Land in 90 Days

Share via:

Subscribe via:

In this conversation, Brent Bowers discusses his experience with a failed land deal in Texas, emphasizing the lessons learned from failure and the critical importance of due diligence in real estate investments.

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Brent (00:00)
I like teaching people how to make, you know, money in land in the next 90 days without cold calling or texting or spending a fortune on marketing.

I’m a vacant, raw land guy. I buy and sell land. In the past year and a half now, I’ve actually been putting brand new mobile homes in this land. been absolutely recharged the batteries because you do 300 plus land deals. You’re like, okay, another land deal. It doesn’t excite me to see another land deal. But when I put a brand new mobile home on it and a beautiful family gets to move in, and a lot of these are pre-sold. We’re selling them before we’re even done getting our certificate of occupancy.

Quentin (02:12)
Hello everyone. Hello. Welcome to the real estate pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. Y’all know I’m excited to be here. Excited to be alive. Excited to have another fantastic guest that’s going to tell us what they do, the expertise at what they do. And I say it all the time, the people that I interviewed, they are experts. Why? Cause they are experts at what they do. They’re experts of their life, their expert at the strategies that they use.

to get them to success. Today is no different. And we have somebody that’s gonna talk about land. And I’m so excited for him to talk about it. Listen, this gentleman to me, he’s an incredible communicator, incredible storyteller. And I just cannot wait for him to dive in and tell you about what he’s doing. So I would love to introduce you all to Mr. Brent Bowers. Mr. Brent, how you doing today, sir?

Brent (03:04)
What’s going on, Quentin? I’m so good. How are you doing?

Quentin (03:08)
man, I’m doing good. It’s gonna sound cliche, but even better that I get a chance to talk to you. know, ⁓ man, have a way to kind of infuse energy. I don’t know if you’ve realized that, but man, when you talk, just my creative worlds just start spinning and I start seeing different things that you’re saying. And so I really appreciate you, man. And that’s what I want to do. I want you to take us into your world. I want you to tell our viewers what your main focus is these days.

If you want to give them a little origin story of how you guys started at doing what you do. And if you want to tell us a part of the world you’re in and the markets that you’re operating in, we would love to know that as well. And so Mr. Brent, sir, you have the floor, my friend.

Brent (03:50)
Yeah, well, thank you so much. Yeah, I’ll tell you what I was a little aggravated for got on this podcast. I was looking at the stack of mail and I hate mail. then I was like, as soon as I got on here and saw your face and started talking to you, I feel better already because this is what I love doing. It lights me up.

I like teaching people how to make, you know, money in land in the next 90 days without cold calling or texting or spending a fortune on marketing.

I’m a vacant, raw land guy. I buy and sell land. In the past year and a half now, I’ve actually been putting brand new mobile homes in this land. been absolutely recharged the batteries because you do 300 plus land deals. You’re like, okay, another land deal. It doesn’t excite me to see another land deal. But when I put a brand new mobile home on it and a beautiful family gets to move in, and a lot of these are pre-sold. We’re selling them before we’re even done getting our certificate of occupancy.

⁓ We sold one, we’re having to push the closing back because we’re waiting on the electric company to turn on our electric, little things like that. But there’s always a challenge, know, in business, we always have another mountain to climb.

Once we scale that to selling one a month, we’ll probably want to change something else. But the goalpost is always moving. you know, it hasn’t always been like that. You know, at one time I was broke, broke, broke.

private in the army, and made it to sergeant and then transferred over to the, the officer world of the military and eventually got out. And I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur now since 2018. so it’s been several years and you know, my son asked me the other day, daddy, why do you have to work on Saturday? And like, really is it work? I was like, actually answered a couple of phone calls, talking to contractors. don’t like.

I didn’t know how to answer it, but I was like, man, buddy, it’s not work. I’m I’m enjoying this. And this is how we have all this stuff. we do get bills and you go to private school and all these things, but they don’t see it. How do we train our kids to be grateful in this crazy world we live in now? But a lot, man, I know that was a lot. I’ll hush up for a minute.

Quentin (07:02)
No, man, that was that was perfect. That was that was great. It took me into my lens of the way you operate, how you have found success, how you are, where you are. And I absolutely love it, man. I’m private in the army. I did not know that. So I appreciate you sharing that. You and I share a fun fact. I do hate mail. I was a mailman. I was a mailman for 14 years, brother. Twenty four thousand steps a day.

Brent (07:25)
Son of a gun.

Quentin (07:31)
Yeah, I hate mail just like you bro.

Brent (07:33)
God bless you. don’t know. Honestly, mad respect for our mail house employees and members because if I had to, well, I actually did mail in the army for a little while. It sucked. When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I had to help with the mail house. No one wanted to do that detail that we would rather go outside the wiring and shot at. ⁓ But yeah, I have an assistant. have an office manager too. And I, my wife flopped all this on my desk here that I was like, what? I try not to cuss.

I was like, why is this on my desk when I pay someone almost? You know what? I’m going to send her all that crap, let her go through it. You just help me. I’m going to send it all to her.

Quentin (08:16)
I hear you man, it’s funny, I don’t check the mail. My wife is the only one that check the mail. She gets mad at me. She said, you don’t check the mail? Listen, I checked the mail for 14 years and she’ll do the same thing. Right to my left is a stack of mail that my wife has put and I’m like, why do you put this mail here? I don’t have the guts to say that to her. I just, but I think it in my head.

Brent (08:48)
the destroy it. I don’t want to see it. I’ll take the checks when there’s a check that comes I’ll take that. That’s it. Don’t show me anything else birthday cards. My have my one of my lenders sends me a Home Depot card every time it’s my birthday. That’s the only time I want to check the mail.

Quentin (09:06)
Come on,

Brent (09:07)
One other time also my birthday. No, yes the same time because my father-in-law every year gives me a hundred bucks for my birthday It’s it’s a payment though. I say it’s a payment because he’s paying me to you know Keep his daughter from moving back in but I’ve been asking him for years now because inflation like Dad like please. Can you increase this? Like you’ve been paying me $100 a year for now almost 13 years Like I think I deserve a raise, but he says the birthday present

Quentin (09:36)
Definitely. I love it, man. Your business is growing. You talked about the one project per month. You talk about increasing that. You pivot from, not necessarily pivot, but add it to buying land, putting mobile homes on it. So I love the way your brain works. So I’m interested to know, have you identified any core strategies

that help you business wise and maybe to help you personal?

like core strategies that kind of keep you focused, keep your eye on the prize. you identified any core strategies that help you?

Brent (10:47)
Yeah, every day doing something physical like working out or walking or swimming or cold plunging. ⁓ A gratefulness ⁓ practice and it doesn’t have to be in the morning. It could be all day long. ⁓ I have a friend, he’s a doctor. He just sent me a voice memo. ⁓ Like he’s a busy guy and we’re in a mastermind together. And I sent him a message on Saturday. I was kind of grumpy.

cause he had sent me one. replied back to him. I was trying to clean the garage and I’m like tripping over dirt bikes, tripping over four wheelers and boats in there. And, my kids, I’m trying to clean the garage and they’re like coming, they’re pulling more stuff out. Like I was taking, making a load to the dump. So I was filling my back of my truck up with stuff like old screen door and my kids are pulling it out and like building forts. And I was kind of venting to him and he’s like, well, man, thank God you have all that stuff. You know, like you’re blessed, you’re abundant. And I was like, ⁓

You know what? Look at it that way. You know, I’m tripping over bicycles. Thank God my kids have bicycles. You know, because we’ve brought bicycles to families before they didn’t have them. And I’m telling you what, saw a lady have a heart attack one time giving her grandchild a bike, which was a heart attack of joy. She was so happy.

Quentin (12:07)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you for sharing, man. My wife and I, have what we call a gratitude jar. And so at the end of the day, we’ll write down something that we’re grateful for, we’ll put in the jar. And at the beginning of the new year, we’re just going to go through all the things we had to be grateful for in 2025 and make sure we’re in a mindset to be grateful in 2026, no matter what.

Brent (12:29)
That

is so cool. I did that something similar to like that for my wife last year every day for like 30 days. I made a video real quick 30 seconds what I was happy about or grateful for her or loved about her. And then my video editor put it all together with music. It was like three songs max. ⁓ I don’t know if she liked it, but I enjoyed doing it.

Quentin (12:54)
No, at least it your perspective it made your perspective to love your wife show gratitude for your wife and sometimes that got to be rewarded in itself like you’re right man sometimes the payoff is not if people receive what we’re doing the payoff is that I have trained and disciplined myself to give to serve to be grateful.

Brent (13:14)
It

was more of gift for me.

Quentin (13:17)
There you go, man. There you go. And this is why I believe I’m so connected to you. This is why I believe when you talk, it kind of fires up my soul because just those disciplines right there, And so, yeah, I appreciate you, bro. Real talk. Now, let’s talk, you know, so success, land, you’re killing it. Things are going well. I want you to take me through kind of the journey to success a little bit. Have there been times of adversity? Have you rubbed up against?

It was that didn’t go the way you thought it would go like you mind sharing maybe one of those source

Brent (13:52)
Yeah, actually, I lost money for the first time ever on a land deal in Texas about eight months ago and it’s the worst timing ever. I had just gotten a big tax bill and some other things were going wrong. It’s like, you know, Lord, what this is worst timing like, but yeah, I almost had to change. Like, what am I to learn from this? ⁓ How is this to serve me type thing? And it’s really taught me to do better and to do more due diligence and to

look at the deal a little bit more factual rather than just a quick numbers look and be like, all right, it’s a great deal. Let’s do it. Um, but you know, I gotta, I gotta say, you know, I’ve done way, way, way, way more profitable deals over the years. You can’t just focus on the one or the two or the free that you’ve lost money on. Um, but it hasn’t always been like that. You know, it’s like when I was in the military, I barely made $4,000 a month and

You know, it’s 2016 and I’m learning this land business. So I started sending out a handwritten postcards that people basically saying, Hey, my name’s Brent. If you’d like to sell your land in El Paso County, Colorado,

I was stationed at Fort Carson, which is Colorado Springs, Colorado. If you’re interested in all cash fair, fair price offer, call me or text me. God bless you. And if anybody wants to copy that, I, I’ve got it on my website. You just go to the land.

sharks.com for slash postcard postcard. Um, I call it the tribe postcard is simple handwritten postcard and it’ll email you a copy of that. But, um, I sent that out to 687 people that were behind on their taxes on the land. And this was junk land, not billable, not accessible, landlocked, uh, you name it, all kinds of issues why people were not paying their taxes on this land.

And it was actually a mistake that I got that list. I was really trying to get the list of people that were just behind on their taxes, all of them. But this was land that was just like in a non-efficient land. The county wanted me to pay the back taxes. No tax lien investor was willing to pay those taxes. So I sent all these poor jokers an email, or not an email, that postcard I just mentioned saying, hey, I’ll buy it. Call me, text me, God bless you. ⁓

And sure enough, people started calling me. So I’m buying this land for like a couple hundred dollars, a couple thousand dollars and like quadrupling and doubling and crazy money. But I, the first one ever I bought for 285 bucks and I sold it to a realtor almost four days later for 5,000. And like, I don’t know what the return on investment is for that. Like I’d need a calculator, but that’s a heck of a ROI. And here’s the thing.

Like I only made 4,000 a month. I just made like five grand. We’ll net profit like 4,700 bucks in a couple hours time. And the second one was even better. I got the next one for 500 bucks. Again, not accessible landlocked land, but this time it was like four acres next to Norad in Colorado, right next to the Colorado state park. And I had no clue what I had my hands on here. ⁓ but I was like, Hey, put it on Craigslist.

Hey, if you get an attorney, can get access to this eventually. It’ll be worth a lot more $5,000. I’ll take 500 down, get my money back, 400 a month. That’s the one that changed my mindset. I was getting, so I sold this one like the next day, got my money back and I’m getting $400 a month. Now my truck payment is getting covered in 2015 timeframe, 2016. I think it was late 2015 actually.

And I was like, I told my wife, was like, all’s we have to do. Cause our expenses were about 4,000 a month at the time. I had a couple of rentals. They were, they were dragging me down. and I told my wife, said, we do this 10 more times. We’re financially free. That’s it. And I did it. I did it way more than 10 more times. we were about 12 K a month within about 18 months. So it’s definitely doable. I was dumb. I didn’t even know what I was doing. ⁓ I have invested a lot of money into coaching and education and.

⁓ Now I get to share that with other people.

Quentin (18:53)
Yeah, yeah, bro. I appreciate you. I’m just gonna say one thing. Hopefully is not disrespectful you wasn’t dumb. You were just ignorant, right? You just didn’t know you didn’t know that’s it right and I and and you know, you just didn’t know and but now You knew enough you knew enough because you literally changed your whole life around so you knew enough Yeah, you could have made more money, but you know now You know now and that’s I think that’s the key

Because there are people that’s bumping up against adversity and they feel dumb like they feel like man I should know better but no you just don’t know what you don’t know take it as a learning lesson and Keep building don’t repeat the same mistake twice or you know two times like keep building and I think that was an incredible story that you told because I’m sorry I’m sure so many people can get so many nuggets from that story. So thank you, man

Brent (19:48)
No, he just made me think of something.

Quentin (19:50)
No, go

ahead. No, no. ⁓ yeah. Please, please.

Brent (19:52)
Yeah, I just had a, so I’m trying to sell or I am selling. I don’t try to do anything. I do it. guys, if you’re listening to this podcast, change your words. ⁓ I’m selling all my residential rental properties in Colorado. boy, I’ve had a bear of one. I actually bought subject to existing finding. I know I’m the land guy. I make a lot of mistakes in residential stuff. ⁓ but I bought it subject to existing financing. Have really never made a penny on this property.

lost quite a bit, about $20,000. So thank God I’m making money and land so can waste it over here, right?

But anyhow, the dang bank called the loan due and I bought it subject to existing financing. Just for anybody’s like, what does that mean? It’s state that the mortgage stayed in the seller’s name. I fixed this property, put a tenant in it for a couple of years. Now I have a tenant buyer. ⁓ And then they call it due. So I literally just transferred this deed back in the seller’s name and turned over my buyer to him.

The only way I ever would have made money on this deal was if I basically financed it for like eight years. And because here’s the thing, 30 year mortgages, you can make a lot of money on interest, the banks front and load that interest. So I was just following that plan. And I spent hours like getting all the paperwork, getting everything back to the seller’s name. And I felt the other day, I was like, wasting so much time on something that has cost me so much money. And I’m probably up to the

tune of like a lot of hours. don’t even want to talk about how many hours, but over $20,000 wasted on this deal. now listening to you there, Quentin, ⁓ like that’s not wasted time. That’s just education. I’ll do it way better next time. Or I’ll learn what makes me money and focus on that one thing. There’s a book that Gary Keller wrote called the one thing we’ve got to focus on what makes us money. ⁓

But wasted time is maybe sitting there watching Netflix or hanging out with the wrong people or poor people. And I don’t mean like poor, like ⁓ they can’t afford, but poor minds, like they’re broke mentalities.

Quentin (22:08)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, man, you brother, you are saying things that I really hope people are letting really sit down and take root into their soul because this could just, the mindset can change everything. I mean, your mindset, even though, you we know when you said, you know, you could have made more money, but your mindset changed, bro. You don’t get to where you are without that mindset shift with buying

those deals back then and doing the, 5,000 and you don’t get the mindset that you have right now without that, without going through that. And so that, that money that maybe you could have made, you actually doubled that in the way down that you think. And so, man, I mean, I hope people are ready to spend attention that the mindset is so, so important, ⁓ so I want to ask you, bro, what’s the next real goal for you, man? What’s, what you push for next?

Brent (23:05)
Yeah, I’m trying. So my goal is I want to be at one of these land mobile home packages per month sold. I’m almost there. I’m really close to that goal. And what I mean by land mobile home package for work. We buy a piece of land, we put the brand new mobile home on it and we sell it to a family for an affordable housing price like the good land plus a brand new home. So I want to have that one a month just going like clockwork.

I actually think we’re there because we’re going to be selling like three in December. But that’s really it. I want to just keep rolling with that. I’m having a lot of fun with that. I want to attract more private lending. And I don’t borrow from banks. I don’t borrow from hard money lenders. I borrow from regular people, usually not in real estate. And I pay anywhere from

a 6 % interest all the way to 12 % interest depending on the project. ⁓ So yeah, that’s my goal. not huge like scale or this or that because the business is running. And I wanna teach more people how to do this. We bring on two people a month, that’s it. ⁓ I wanna bring more people alongside of me to do it. Like yes, we have a course, we have a coaching program, but I don’t wanna be another…

online course, I want to be actually getting people results very quickly because that’s the name of the game.

Quentin (24:37)
Yeah. Yeah. Man, I appreciate you so much, man. This has been good. This has been fun. Listen, someone wanted to reach out to you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing. What’s the best way for them to get in contact with you,

Brent (24:51)
Yeah, two ways. If you want to just get right on my calendar, go to the landsharks.com. I want to hear your journey and what you’re up to. And so many people tell me, I’m in education mode. Well, let’s get you in do mode. How do I get you there? ⁓ then number two, if you’re you’re not ready to like talk, jump on my YouTube channel, Brent Bowers, Brent Bowers.

Quentin (25:15)
Yeah, man, I appreciate you, man. Appreciate your story. Appreciate your time. Definitely appreciate your perspective, man. This has been really good for me, man. Really good for my soul. Really good. Just to listen to you and just, know our viewers is going to get a ton of value out of this conversation. So thank you for being here today, man. It was great.

Brent (25:36)
My pleasure sir, thank you for having me.

Quentin (25:39)
Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard my man Brent. He didn’t give me nugget after nugget, value after value. You want to make sure you subscribe because you do not want to miss out on these amazing conversations that I get the privilege to have every single day. And so we want you to continue to have the privilege as well. So just subscribe. That way, when the alert comes off, you can come on in and just get the nuggets. So Mr. Brent, sir, I thank you again. And to everyone else, we’ll see you on the next time.

Tags:

Investor Fuel

Land Deals, No Cold Calls: How Brent Bowers Makes Money With Land in 90 Days

Show Summary

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Tags:

Ready to take your business to the next level? Take the next steps below